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Today:
NASA Employees Warn Science and Safety Are at Risk from White House Budget Cuts
NEWS | 22 July 2025
The declaration also urges the acting head of NASA not to make the unprecedented budget cuts Trump has proposed. The agency has fired some employees and pressured others to leave, resulting in the loss of more than 2,600 of the 17,000-plus NASA employees, according to news platform Politico. At least US$118 million in NASA grants has been cancelled outright, and the White House has proposed slashing nearly half of the agency’s science budget for next year. The White House budget proposal, for instance, would cancel NASA participation in European Space Agency missions to Mars and Venus. Of the 287 signatories to the NASA document, 156 are anonymous.

Top Stories:
Male Birth Control Pill YCT-529 Passes Human Safety Test
NEWS | 22 July 2025
Now a male birth control pill with an entirely new kind of contraceptive mechanism has been tested for the first time in humans. In the first clinical trial of its kind, a nonhormonal oral contraceptive that reversibly stops sperm production has just been deemed safe for human use. Safety results from the early phase 1 clinical trial were published on Tuesday in Communications Medicine. “Every medication on the market has side effects.”Several other reversible male birth control methods are now in the clinical trial pipeline as well. A couple of other candidates for hormonally acting daily male contraceptive pills are in early development.

World:
How Humility Can Restore Trust in Expertise
NEWS | 22 July 2025
Research has linked intellectual humility with many desirable behaviors, including considering others’ perspectives, being better at conflict resolution and being less dogmatic. We propose that encouraging others to value intellectual humility in experts could be critical to correcting that tendency. Across our datasets, a small portion of respondents linked expertise with intellectual humility. Doing so seems especially valuable, given the potential for intellectual humility in helping experts gain public trust and confidence. Part of the solution may lie in valuing intellectual humility in and of itself.

Current Events:
Bird Flu Volume 2, Issue 1
NEWS | 22 July 2025
Influenza viruses like bird flu can mix and match their genomes, and this has played a role in at least three of the last four flu pandemics

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SPONSORED | 22 July 2025
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News Flash:
Could Bird Flu Spread between Humans? Here’s What It Would Take
NEWS | 22 July 2025
The receptor-binding domain is a crucial but delicate fragment of the flu virus that allows it to dock onto and enter specific cells in the body. Or it might be quick: another worry is reassortment, the ability of a flu virus to snag genetic material from another flu virus more adept at infecting people. A person who happened to be infected with both avian flu and seasonal flu could be ground zero for this kind of change. Finally, an adapted avian flu would need to evade our innate immune system, the body’s nonspecific defenses against new invaders. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic, known as the “swine flu” pandemic, was caused by a new H1N1 flu strain that had emerged from a mix of several pig flus, a human flu and an avian flu.

Latest:
Bird Flu Is Killing Wildlife, and Experts Fear the Ecological Toll
NEWS | 22 July 2025
Bird flu fears have focused on the poultry and dairy industries and human health. She lived that reality firsthand in early 2022, soon after the killer strain of bird flu arrived in North America. Other species—Merlins, Cooper’s Hawks, Sharp-shinned Hawks—may be equally vulnerable bird flu but have never come as close to extinction. Officials were so concerned that they took the unprecedented step of vaccinating condors against bird flu, but the damage was already done. Among the most recently reported infections of bird flu in U.S. wildlife: a round-tailed ground squirrel and a desert cottontail in Arizona.

Breaking:
Bird Flu Is out of the News but Still Circulating
NEWS | 22 July 2025
Bird flu was nearly everywhere in the U.S.—in chickens, cows, pet cats and even humans. What made the virus apparently fade away—and what does that mean for the future of bird flu? The most reliable data on bird flu prevalence come from poultry operations. Cows that are sick with bird flu eat less and produce thick and discolored milk. Another way experts have kept tabs on bird flu has been through existing national flu surveillance—but because normal flu infections are in a seasonal lull, so are tests through that network.

Trending:
How to Protect Pets and Backyard Chickens from Bird Flu
NEWS | 22 July 2025
Eating raw food amplifies a pet’s risk, Sykes says, because that can expose them to meat that is contaminated with bird flu or other pathogens. Like commercially farmed poultry, backyard chickens are also vulnerable to bird flu. If the lab confirms the chicken died of bird flu, the rest of the flock will need to be culled. A cat with respiratory symptoms is more likely to be ill with something other than bird flu, Sykes says. And getting a flu shot will help reduce the chance of seasonal influenzas mingling with H5N1 if you are exposed to bird flu.

This Just In:
Bird Flu, Salmonella and Other Health Risks from Raw Eggs Explained
NEWS | 22 July 2025
To minimize Salmonella risk, commercial eggs in the U.S. are washed to remove bacteria and then kept refrigerated until they are sold. In the U.S. all commercial egg products—such as liquid egg yolks and egg whites—are required to be pasteurized, however. Backyard poultry pose a potential risk because they may have contact with wild birds or contaminants, Persia notes. He recommends feeding backyard birds inside, even if they have outdoor access, to avoid attracting wild birds. The Louisiana patient had had contact with both wild birds and backyard poultry.

Today:
Physicists Finally Know How the Strong Force Gets Its Strength
NEWS | 22 July 2025
The strongest force in the universe is called, aptly, the strong force. Despite knowing roughly how it compares with the other forces, scientists don’t know precisely how strong the strong force is. So despite its importance to nuclear physics and building the material world, the strong force is not unconditionally loved by researchers. Instead many look at the domain where the strong force is truly strong as a “Terra Damnata,” a realm to avoid at all costs. In fact, the strong force accounts for the origin of around 99 percent of the mass in the visible universe.

Top Stories:
Tomorrow's Quantum Computers Threaten Today's Secrets. Here's How to Protect Them
NEWS | 22 July 2025
It solicited ideas for “post-quantum” or “quantum-resistant” cryptography—codes that can run on today’s computers but are so robust that not even quantum computers could break them. “At the time quantum computers seemed like they were way, way far in the future,” Shor says. By hovering between the two states, qubits enable quantum computers to perform certain tasks much faster than classical computers. (Confusingly, “quantum cryptography” refers to something else—using quantum phenomena as part of the security scheme.) To protect quantum computers' fragile behavior, facilities must keep them isolated from their environments and supercooled.

World:
The Little-Known Origin Story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics
NEWS | 22 July 2025
National ArchivesIn 2022 the Nobel Prize Committee honored experimental work on entanglement by three physicists. Together those experiments led to their 2022 Nobel Prize. That October, Yang and Lee became the first two Chinese Americans in history to win the Nobel Prize. Like a prism, the 1957 Nobel Prize separated out elements of identity like bands of light, rendering the impact of gender more visible. The 2022 Nobel Prize celebrated a set of connected experiments that took place at a great distance from one another.

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SPONSORED | 22 July 2025
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Current Events:
Physicists Make Matter out of Light to Find Quantum Singularities
NEWS | 22 July 2025
In place of the atomic lattice, we use light waves to create what we call an optical lattice. This change means the BEC’s quantum state has jumped from its ground state to its first excited state. We discovered that the BEC’s quantum state “wraps” around the Dirac point exactly once. This result means the BEC’s quantum state picked up a geometric phase of exactly 2π. After much effort and clever thinking, we finally saw the first measurement in which a BEC’s quantum state exhibited wrapping around a QBTP.